A certain science fiction show made famous the ‘beam me up’ effect and standardized in the audience's mind the idea of a shimmering light surrounding the person being transported in this way. Paul Ekert, author of Creating Hollywood-Style Movies with Adobe Premiere Elements 7, shows how to design your own 'Beam of Shimmering Light' effect that can be used over and over in countless projects.

From the author of

From the author of

What Is the 'Beam of Shimmering Light' Effect?

The Beam of Shimmering Light effect, for the sake of this article, is an encapsulated rectangle of different colored mattes that simulate the sort of effect that you will have seen used in Star Trek.

In this short article, you'll learn how to create this effect entirely within Premiere Elements 7no other application is needed. Once you've mastered this effect, you'll be able to use the exported result in two future articles by the same author: "The Replicator Effect" and "The Holo-Projection Effect"! You'll also have a terrific "stock" effect that you can call on at any time to use in your own projects.

Step by step, you'll create a color matte in various shades, manipulate the size of the color matte by using the motion parameters, and enhance the Beam of Shimmering Light effect using the various effects that come standard with Premiere Elements 7. You'll also use the copy and paste functions to copy effect parameters from one color matte to another.